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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Special Features:
SUN EXPANDS COMPUTING POWER FOR MUSEUM WITH PARALLEL CLUSTERS
Sun Microsystems Inc announced its sponsorship and technology donation valued
at more than $1 million to the American Museum of Natural History. With Sun's
technology support, the museum's department of astrophysics is working in
collaboration with top universities on research focused on the formation and
evolution of stars, star clusters and galaxies.
Sun Microsystems donated two parallel clusters to the Museum, one including 24
Sun Fire V60X servers, and the other including three Sun Fire V1280 servers
and one Sun Fire V880z visualization server running the Solaris Operating
System. The enterprise-class combination of the Sun Fire servers represents a
substantial addition to the computing power of the Museum's Department of
Astrophysics. Sun's 40 processor cluster with 304 Gb of RAM is a powerful
upgrade. The large amount of RAM in each node provides the research team the
ability to process large parallel jobs with low latency.
"The computational power delivered to us by Sun Microsystems' technology has
expanded our research capabilities," said Michael J. Novacek, senior vice
president, provost and curator of the American Museum of Natural History.
"With the addition of these parallel clusters, Museum scientists are already
beginning to make exciting discoveries in astrophysics and beyond, and we are
very grateful for Sun's generosity."
The addition of the Sun Fire V60X servers also enabled the Museum to put the
next-generation digital technology to new use with SonicVision, the innovative
digitally animated alternative-rock music show that opened to great acclaim
last fall in the Hayden Planetarium in the Museum's Rose Center for Earth and
Space. The Museum co-produced the show with MTV2 and musical artist Moby, with
music featuring tracks from Radiohead, U2, David Bowie and many other artists.
SonicVision's music virtually ignites this one-of-a-kind musical and visual
experience, which uses the Hayden Planetarium's renowned digital dome
technology to illuminate the 6,550-square-foot dome with a morphing of
colorful visions.
The V60X servers brought another 48 high speed Sun processors (each V60 has
two processors) to the system working in unison to constitute a potent
computer graphics rendering machine. This 48-processor "render farm" computed
the visual effects seen in the show in only a few months using both custom
software and standard moviemaking applications. With this incredibly powerful
technology, coupled with compelling imagery and contemporary music, the
Museum's Hayden Planetarium leads the way for an entirely new generation of
audiovisual shows for the 21st century.
"Sun together with the American Museum of Natural History is committed to
pushing innovation beyond what most think may be achievable," stated Kim
Jones, vice president of Global Education and Research for Sun Microsystems.
"The Museum's enhanced supercomputing power is not only advancing academic
research -- through SonicVision, it is bringing the extraordinary power of
computing to the general public."
The Museum's Department of Astrophysics is utilizing the high-performance
cluster to run simulations of star formation at many scales. Grid-based
simulations at resolutions up to 2563 zones of non-ideal magnetohydrodynamics
model the formation of single star-forming cores at scales of 1,000 AU (1 AU
is the Earth-Sun distance). At the 1-10 light year scale, chemistry is
included to model star-forming clouds of interstellar molecular gas. At the
1,000 light year scale, adaptive mesh refinement techniques allow modeling of
the hypersonic turbulent flows resulting from hundreds of supernova
explosions. Finally, smoothed particle hydrodynamics allows modeling of star
formation in complete spiral galaxies, using more than a million particles.
The research team is also leveraging the computational power of the cluster to
examine the effects of star formation, radiation and supernova explosions on
intergalactic gas. In other work, Department researchers have been able to
detect some of the most metal-poor stars and several hundred erupting novae in
the Virgo galaxy cluster through their advanced computing technologies. The
Department's research program includes both observations from major ground and
space-based observatories including the Hubble Space Telescope, and
computational modeling using facilities including both the Sun cluster and the
Museum's Parallel Computing Facility.
About Sun Microsystems Inc
Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision -- "The Network Is The
Computer" -- has propelled Sun Microsystems Inc to its position as a leading
provider of industrial-strength hardware, software and services that make the
Net work. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the World Wide
Web at http://sun.com/ .
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